Businesses and consumers have many opportunities to interact, e.g., via almost ubiquitous wireless connectivity. By providing wireless connectivity on their premises, businesses need no longer rely upon surveys or websites to infer user purchasing and social behaviors, but may instead acquire this information passively by monitoring consumers' mobile devices when they arrive on location. Similarly, consumers benefit from the pervasive architectures as they have many more methods and opportunities to charge businesses for their data and to reap the business' individually customized responses. For example, previously a consumer would merely receive a coupon, or other token remuneration, for completing a survey. There would be little guarantee that the consumer's personal preferences reflected in the survey would actually be acted upon by the business, their personal preferences likely being lost among the aggregate responses of millions of other consumers. In contrast, a business can now uniquely identify the same customer on successive occasions using the consumer's mobile device and may provide the consumer with individualized offers and benefits. The business's resources are better allocated to serving the individual customer and the individual customer has greater control over the granularity of the data they provide to the business.
However, the passive character of many wireless transactions may thwart the adoption of the systems providing these mutual benefits. Unscrupulous businesses may aggressively acquire user data beyond the consumer's actual preferences and may present irrelevant offers and advertisements to the consumer. Consumers may decline helpful and legitimate business offers fearing to open a floodgate of undesired data gather and advertising. Furthermore, unscrupulous businesses and consumers may impersonate other businesses and consumers to manipulate data collection. Because the collection is passive, businesses may unwittingly acquire information in which they are uninterested and consumers may unwittingly provide information they did not wish to provide.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.